“The Culture Builders Profiling tool gives you an assessment of how you prefer to engage and lead others – showing how your preferences, experience and activity split across five core roles.”

More specifically:

Measures both your preference and strength in the five roles, and the sub elements that make them up

Gives you results based on comparison with a sample of the population

Shows where you are strongest, and where you should focus development activity

Gives you an insight into how you will tackle any engagement work, and how to plan to succeed

Suitable for all managers and leaders of people, regardless of seniority or profession

Can be used to build an action plan for coaches to take an individual through

Ideal for understanding group dynamic and make-up, and to look at what other people skills are needed for success

Can be used for selection and recruitment purposes

Ideal for anyone taking on culture change programmes or leading organisations during times of change

Over the last two years Jane Sparrow and Chris Preston researched content for a recently released book, The Culture Builders. Through the interviews and research we defined what makes a powerful, high performing culture.

Organisations that have strong, rich cultures are full of people who believe passionately about what they do – they understand how their daily activity supports the company aim, and how the organisation’s aim delivers value to society. They are ‘Investors’ not ‘Savers’. Savers do a good job and take a monthly return in the form of salary. Investors risk more because they believe in what they do, see a connection with it and will give their all each day, without expecting an immediate financial return.

It is the role of leaders and line managers across the business to move people in the direction of Investors. The examples we heard, from companies large and small, showed us how great engagers (be they leaders or first-line managers) are adept at inhabiting five roles as they look to move the workforce from caring about the business, to being passionate about it. An organisation full of investors (and they do exist) can achieve amazing things and delight and move their customers way beyond the ‘OK’ mark.

We use the phrase Investor to describe the levels of commitment, involvement and ownership that people feel and demonstrate when they genuinely feel part of an organisation. The five roles get them there – steering, challenging, talking, doing and inspiring. They also ensure that the Investment is balanced with the company and customer interests.

THE ROLES

The Prophet: the one with the vision for the future, forward-looking, inspirationally overflowing. This role is all about what’s over the horizon, and we should all be aiming to get there (the past’s a forgotten place).

The Storyteller: bringing the journey to life, uses rich language to localise the vision and help people bridge the gap between where we are and where we’re going.

The Strategist:keeping it all on track, aligning actions and people with the goal, ensuring ‘it’s for the long term’. Driving consistency of behaviour and longevity of an initiative to ensure a successful outcome.

The Coach: Knowing what makes the heart ‘beat’ of the people in their team, and using that knowledge to engage them fully in the activity, to use the engagement process to grow and challenge them, constantly thinking how.

The final role is what we term the ‘style’ role, and focuses more on the personal approaches that a leader of people will rely upon:

The Pilot: The person with their hand on the tiller, the calm, firm voice in times of change – a style that colours how the person delivers the four ‘type’ roles and steers teams to act and develop in very different ways (we break this role down into three areas: Authoritative, Inclusive and Enabling).